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The Journal Gazette first profiled Katrina Simpkins on April 26 in “Jumping Into Rhythm,” a story about her love of jump-rope and her relationship with a dolphin in Florida. As the nation gives thanks today, we offer an update on the Columbia City girl and some of the things for which she’s thankful.
Let’s get this out of the way right now: Katrina Simpkins is not a hero.
She’s an 11-year-old who loves jump-rope, gymnastics and her Best Friend For Life, Holly. She has older siblings, boys she likes, girls she doesn’t and a guinea pig with a seemingly endless appetite for a certain reporter’s business cards.
She’s thankful for her family and Holly and her mom and everyone who’s ever been really nice to her – which is a lot of people. She’s thankful for a dolphin at Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Clearwater, Fla., named Winter. Even though she’s 1,100 miles away, life is just somehow easier for Katrina thanks to the dolphin with a revolutionary prosthetic tail. They’re friends, she says, because they’re the same.
She doesn’t know how any of that could possibly be heroic.
“I don’t know how people who go inside a real fire and rescue a girl can do it,” Katrina says. “That’s a hero. Fires actually kill people.”
She also has no desire to become a hero.
“I want to move to Florida and be a dolphin trainer,” she says. “And Holly wants to move in with me.”
What she really wants, more than anything else, like every 11-year-old – like everyone, really – is to be normal.
But normal can be hard when your right leg is mostly plastic and steel.
It’s 4 p.m. on a Monday and the budding gymnasts at More Than Gymnastics are warming up by running laps through the gym and down the carpeted hallways. Katrina keeps up pretty well, despite the rolling gait caused by her right leg’s being turned inward and the fact that she’s wearing her old prosthesis because it’s lighter and therefore easier to manipulate during gymnastics than her new leg. But it’s also too short.
On top of that, her prosthetics don’t have a running foot, so there’s no pushback from the floor in her right leg – imagine trying to run when much of your right leg is a sandbag instead of tendons and muscles.
Katrina has PFFD – proximal femoral focal deficiency – a birth defect in which the hip end of the thigh bone does not develop. The condition can vary in its severity, but for Katrina, where her right knee would normally be is instead her foot.
A surgery at age 1 turned her foot backward so that her ankle can act as a knee joint, and the prosthetic completes the package, giving her a leg that reaches to the floor and a plastic foot on which she can put shoes. Today, it’s even dirtier than her real foot.
Despite the prosthesis, Katrina moves quickly as she runs, adding an extra hop in her left leg’s stride to make up for the lack of action from her right.
She’s halfway down the hallway, right in front of the newspaper photographer, when it happens: One of her feet catches the floor and she flies face-first into the carpet, a tumble of legs, arms, hair and embarrassment.
She lands on her left shoulder, leaving a beet-red carpet burn the size of a quarter on her skin, but she quickly rolls to her stomach, her face in her hands as a trampling horde of her fellow gymnasts leap over and around where she lies.
She lies still for a moment as coaches and parents run toward her, then gets up. Her jaw is set and her eyes are steel as she brushes herself off, and then she starts running again. Soon, the only reminder that it ever happened is the red welt on her shoulder, which she occasionally blows on because it burns.
After some stretching, she’s hard at work tumbling, practicing moves on the uneven bars and using the balance beam, ready for whatever challenge is next.
Even Dr. Dan Strzempka is amazed.
Of course, Strzempka is amazed by all his patients.
Strzempka designed Katrina’s last two legs – the old leg she uses for gymnastics and the new one she got this summer, which features a tie-dyed blue “Winter” T-shirt on the hip, while the ankle sports “Holly BFFL 2009” and a Jump Rope for Life logo.
“It’s every kid that comes in here,” Strzempka says of the Hangar Prosthetics clinic he works at in Sarasota, Fla. “You always have expectations of what they’re going to be able to do, and 99 percent of the time they exceed those. Some of these people are doing triathlons.”
And some of them aren’t even people – Strzempka also designed Winter’s tail, a groundbreaking device that is now helping Strzempka and others design better prosthetics for humans.
Winter was caught in the ropes of a crab trap and would have died except that she was rescued and taken to Clearwater Marine Aquarium. The tangle of ropes had become a tourniquet, and her tail eventually died and fell off. Strzempka accepted the challenge of building a replacement – something that had never been tried.
One of the biggest challenges was keeping the tail on, Strzempka said, just as it is with human prosthetics.
“We needed a liner that was stickier and more elastic, so there was less circumferential pressure,” he said. In other words, it needed to be like a sock that stays up on your calf without falling down, but not so tight that circulation is cut off. But this sock needed to withstand the forces of moving a dolphin through the water.
The answer for Winter lay in one of the human body’s most brilliant design concepts: combining materials that are hard with materials that are soft. The human hand, for example, works so well because it is filled with hard bones to give it the strength of a fist but covered with skin soft enough to caress a baby. We are covered with similar examples.
“(Winter’s tail) was the first time we combined two different materials like that in a device, where it’s both stiff and soft,” Strezmpka said.
Now, that combination of stiff and soft is being used to make human prosthetics better.
Strezmpka said there are three challenges in prosthetic limbs: keeping it on, controlling it and dealing with it. The third challenge can be the biggest, because a prosthesis forces you to use parts of the body in ways they were not designed to be used.
Consider your heel: It’s got a large bone big enough to both handle the impact of walking and protect the ankle joint just above it from that impact. That bone is cushioned by thick, relatively hard skin – almost like armor when compared with the thin, soft skin on the underside of your arm. You can take thousands of steps a day – putting hundreds of pounds of pressure on just a few square inches each and every time – and never even feel it.
Now cut your leg off at mid-shin and attach a leg of plastic and steel. The stub does not have a heel bone. It does not have thick, calloused skin on the end. The artificial leg could quickly become a torture device – or worse.
“Katrina used to have fractures because of the design of her previous (prosthetic leg),” Strzempka said. “She has an incredibly weak femur due to the fractures growing up.”
Not anymore, thanks to Strzempka and his creations. Now, there’s almost nothing she can’t do.
So is Strzempka a hero? Katrina’s mother Maria Simpkins thinks so, but not just because of his designs.
It was July, and the Simpkins family had traveled from their Columbia City home to Clearwater so Katrina could see Winter and be fitted for a new leg, as she had grown at least three inches since her last one.
Usually, the process is a long one, involving several visits to Strzempka’s office in Sarasota, but this time there were problems. After making a cast of her leg that Monday, they were supposed to go back Tuesday to work on the hardware – the joints and components that make up the rest of the prosthesis. But the parts didn’t arrive, so the appointment was postponed.
“I know how long it takes to make a prosthesis and I am completely stressed,” Maria wrote in a letter to friends, because they had to leave Friday to return to Indiana. “How are we going to make this prosthesis by Thursday?”
Then the Wednesday appointment had to be canceled because the parts still hadn’t arrived.
“I am completely panicked at this call,” Maria wrote. “I begin to think we are going to have to stay the weekend and finish on Monday.”
That extended stay was an expense the family could hardly afford.
But when the appointment finally happens on Thursday, there is a surprise: Strzempka walks into the room carrying a new prosthesis.
“He tells us how he has never been challenged like this before, but that he and his guys stayed up all night to get this thing made,” Maria wrote. “Katrina was so happy, surprised, excited, and I think I was amazed, knowing that this guy basically made this prosthesis from scratch by memory. How did he do it? I don’t know. I call it a gift of God … I am forever thankful that God has given us this wonderful team of people.”
Strzempka is thankful, too, but for something that might surprise you. When he was 4 years old, he fell under a lawnmower and his left leg was amputated above the knee. He understands what his patients are going through in ways no one else can.
“I feel fortunate this happened to me because it makes you appreciate the things you can do,” he said. “You don’t whine about what you can’t do. It changes your attitude.”
As Katrina works with gymnastics coach Kelsey Edholm, it’s clear that the exercises are more difficult because of the prosthesis. But she never, ever stops trying. And with each try, she gets a little better.
The more demanding the task Edholm gives her, the more Katrina seems to relish the challenge – working over and over and over until she gets it right.
And in between, she teases the reporter and photographer following her around, because she’s Katrina.
“I’d give anything to see you on these (uneven) bars,” she tells this reporter – the same reporter she talked into joining her on a trampoline six months earlier. And her new friend the photographer? “I think you’d kill yourself if you tried to do this,” Katrina teases.
Between workouts, she chats and talks about the things for which she’s thankful. She’s thankful for her friends. She’s thankful whenever Holly is not grounded. She’s thankful for her gymnastics coaches.
But tell her that Strzempka is thankful for the accident that took his leg and she doesn’t understand that any more than she understands why people would call her a hero. She doesn’t understand it at all.
“I’m not really thankful I have this,” Katrina says. “I just want to be a normal somebody.”
